The first solo show in Italy of Czech artist Štěpánka Sigmundová has the generic title National Museum, without saying which museum, or if this is a real place, a museum that exists here and now. It is Štěpánka’s project that de-localizes the National Museum in Prague (in Czech Národní museum) by moving it, through Boccanera Temporary Gallery, in another place, where it settles for a little more than one month. The subtitle hints at Giorgio Agamben’s book The Time That Remains (Stanford University Press) an important and difficult book, that describes an experience of time that, in Agamben’s words, relies on the inversion of the relationship between past and future, memory and hope. The museum on show is the name without place of this experience of time, of an esthetic, a distilled collective memory, generated and made instrumental to an idea of national historiography. The show consists in a series of photographs that crystallize the spaces, now empty, of the National Museum, where historical objects, relics of the past, are frozen into Lehrstücke. This experiment, though, does not harden memory, it does not make it harsher. And in this nameless museum each visitor may project her own national memory, without suffering the affront of being guided by a criterion of political correctness. Štěpánka’s Museum does not have the political function of instructing the visitor, but it tries to elicit an extreme form of cathartic misunderstanding.

Štepánka Sigmundová (1990) has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague since 2011. Sigmundová is an obssesive collector of objects and stories which form her remembering, external memory and subjective experience. In a series of works the artist accentuates different interpretations and views of personal narratives. In parallel she maps and emphasises processes in her own environment in relation to the public sphere. Her latest exhibitions include: Š aloun On A Walk , Antik Shop Krymská, Prague (2013); Into The Mind s Of Choices , 35m2, Prague (2012); Praha/Rennes, Anne Frank Memorial , Brno (2012); Behind The Spines Of The Books I have Not Read , Hvězda Summer Pavilion, Prague (2011). Štěpánka Sigmundová lives and works in Prague.